Sr SWE, Fraud Science Data Platform

The Company

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. 

We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.

We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards.  Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade. 

Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day.  We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Job Summary:

The Fraud Science & Intelligence (FSI) team at PayPal builds the data and intelligence platforms that safeguard our customers and enable risk, compliance, and financial crime detection at global scale. We combine advanced data engineering, applied ML, and threat intelligence to uncover and disrupt sophisticated criminal networks operating globally. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimizing the SQL pipelines that power our fraud feature store and account linking intelligence systems. You will work on production-grade data transformations in BigQuery, manage job scheduling and orchestration, and drive significant performance improvements to reduce runtime execution costs. This role is ideal for an engineer who loves building efficient, maintainable SQL pipelines and wants to see their work directly impact fraud detection across PayPal's platform.

Job Description:

Essential Responsibilities:

• Delivers complete solutions spanning all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) (design, implementation, testing, delivery and operations), based on definitions from more senior roles.
• Advises immediate management on project-level issues
• Guides junior engineers
• Operates with little day-to-day supervision, making technical decisions based on knowledge of internal conventions and industry best practices
• Applies knowledge of technical best practices in making decisions

Expected Qualifications:

• 3+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.

What You'll Do

• Develop and maintain production SQL pipelines in BigQuery that process billions of rows daily, supporting fraud detection, investigations, and ML modeling teams across Global Financial Crimes and Customer Protection.

• Optimize SQL query performance and reduce runtime execution through query tuning, partitioning/clustering strategies, materialized views, and cost-efficient pipeline design—targeting measurable improvements in slot usage and processing time.

• Build modular, testable SQL transformations using dbt, Dataform, or similar frameworks that translate investigative heuristics and typology insights into ML-ready features with rapid deployment cycles.

• Manage and maintain production job scheduling using Airflow/Cloud Composer, including DAG development, dependency management, backfill execution, and monitoring for pipeline reliability.

• Implement data quality validation frameworks (dbt tests, custom SQL checks, or Great Expectations) to ensure pipeline accuracy, catch data anomalies, and maintain trust in downstream fraud detection systems.

• Collaborate with data scientists and investigators to understand feature requirements and translate them into efficient, production-ready SQL implementations.

• Support operational monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response for production data jobs.

• Document SQL code and pipeline architecture to enable team knowledge sharing and maintainability.

Expected Qualifications

• 5+ years of production data engineering experience with focus on building and maintaining SQL-based data pipelines. Strong track record optimizing query performance and reducing execution costs at scale.

• BigQuery SQL Expertise: Expert-level proficiency in BigQuery SQL including scripting, dynamic query execution, window functions, recursive CTEs, partitioning/clustering, and performance tuning on billion-row datasets. Deep understanding of BigQuery cost optimization including slot management and query profiling.

• Pipeline Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Airflow/Cloud Composer, dbt, or Dataform for scheduling, dependency management, backfills, and production pipeline operations. Comfortable debugging failed jobs and implementing retry/recovery logic.

• SQL Performance Optimization: Demonstrated ability to analyze slow-running queries, identify bottlenecks, and implement optimizations that significantly reduce runtime and cost. Experience with query execution plans, materialized views, incremental processing patterns, and partition pruning.

• Data Modeling Fundamentals: Understanding of dimensional modeling, entity linking, identity resolution, and feature engineering patterns. Ability to design efficient table schemas that balance query performance with storage costs.

• Software Engineering Practices: Strong fundamentals in Git workflows, code reviews, testing strategies, and documentation. Ability to write clean, modular SQL code that other engineers can understand and maintain.

• Python for Data Engineering: Proficiency using Python for data processing, pipeline orchestration, and tooling (pandas, numpy). Comfortable writing Python scripts to support SQL pipeline operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Feature Store Experience: Prior work building or contributing to feature stores, ML data platforms, or analytical data products. Understanding of feature drift, temporal validation, and serving patterns for ML models.

• Data Quality & Observability: Experience implementing comprehensive data validation frameworks, pipeline monitoring, anomaly detection, or data quality metrics tracking.

• Advanced BigQuery Features: Experience with BigQuery ML (BQML), stored procedures, or advanced analytical functions. Familiarity with BigQuery billing, reservation pricing, and cost management strategies.

• Fraud/Financial Crimes Domain: Understanding of fraud typologies, AML red flags, behavioral patterns, or investigative workflows is helpful but not required—we can teach fraud domain knowledge to strong engineers.

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or quantitative field

• Portfolio of SQL code or data pipelines demonstrating optimization work and production experience

• Strong communication skills—ability to document technical work and collaborate with cross-functional teams

Subsidiary:

PayPal

Travel Percent:

0

PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam. To learn more about how to identify and avoid recruitment fraud please visit https://careers.pypl.com/contact-us.

For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.

Our Benefits:

At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset—you. That’s why we offer benefits to help you thrive in every stage of life. We champion your financial, physical, and mental health by offering valuable benefits and resources to help you care for the whole you.

We have great benefits including a flexible work environment, employee shares options, health and life insurance and more. To learn more about our benefits please visit https://www.paypalbenefits.com.

Who We Are:

Click Here to learn more about our culture and community.

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion 

PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.  In addition, PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.  If you are unable to submit an application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at [email protected].  

Belonging at PayPal: 

Our employees are central to advancing our mission, and we strive to create an environment where everyone can do their best work with a sense of purpose and belonging. Belonging at PayPal means creating a workplace with a sense of acceptance and security where all employees feel included and valued. We are proud to have a diverse workforce reflective of the merchants, consumers, and communities that we serve, and we continue to take tangible actions to cultivate inclusivity and belonging at PayPal.

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please Join our Talent Community.

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates. Please don’t hesitate to apply.